Between the World and Me (Unabridged)

More by Ta-Nehisi Coates

• 

  Between the World and Me (Unabridged)

  Ta-Nehisi Coates Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States” (The New York Observer)
  
  #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER | NAACP IMAGE AWARD WINNER | PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST | NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST | NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Washington Post • People • Entertainment Weekly • Vogue • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • New York • Newsday • Library Journal • Publishers Weekly
  
  In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?
  
  Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.
  
  Praise for Between the World and Me
  
  “Powerful . . . a searing meditation on what it means to be black in America today.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
  
  “Eloquent . . . in the tradition of James Baldwin with echoes of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man . . . an autobiography of the black body in America.”—The Boston Globe
  
  “Brilliant . . . [Coates] is firing on all cylinders.”—The Washington Post
  
  “Urgent, lyrical, and devastating . . . a new classic of our time.”—Vogue
  
  “A crucial book during this moment of generational awakening.”—The New Yorker
  
  “Titanic and timely . . . essential reading.”—Entertainment Weekly

• 

  We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (Unabridged)

  Ta-Nehisi Coates In these “urgently relevant essays,”* the National Book Award–winning author of Between the World and Me “reflects on race, Barack Obama’s presidency and its jarring aftermath”*—including the election of Donald Trump.
  
  New York Times Bestseller • Finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize
  
  Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times • USA Today • Time • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle • Essence • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Week • Kirkus Reviews
  
  *Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
  
  “We were eight years in power” was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America’s “first white president.”
  
  But the story of these present-day eight years is not just about presidential politics. This book also examines the new voices, ideas, and movements for justice that emerged over this period—and the effects of the persistent, haunting shadow of our nation’s old and unreconciled history. Coates powerfully examines the events of the Obama era from his intimate and revealing perspective—the point of view of a young writer who begins the journey in an unemployment office in Harlem and ends it in the Oval Office, interviewing a president.
  
  We Were Eight Years in Power features Coates’s iconic essays first published in The Atlantic, including “Fear of a Black President,” “The Case for Reparations,” and “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” along with eight fresh essays that revisit each year of the Obama administration through Coates’s own experiences, observations, and intellectual development, capped by a bracingly original assessment of the election that fully illuminated the tragedy of the Obama era. We Were Eight Years in Power is a vital account of modern America, from one of the definitive voices of this historic moment.
  
  “Essential . . . Coates’s probing essays about race, politics, and history became necessary ballast for this nation’s gravity-defying moment.”—The Boston Globe 

• 

  The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood

  Ta-Nehisi Coates Ta-Nehisi Coates' debut is an infectious, reflective memoir-a lyrical saga of surviving the crack-stricken streets of Baltimore in the '80s. Son of Vietnam vet and black awareness advocate Paul Coates-a poor man who set out to publish lost classics of black history-Ta- Nehisi drifts toward salvation at Howard University, while his ominous brother Big Bill finds his own rhythm hustling.

• 

  We Were Eight Years in Power: Eine amerikanische Tragödie

  Ta-Nehisi Coates Mit Barack Obama sollte die amerikanische Gesellschaft ihren jahrhundertealten Rassismus überwinden. Am Ende seiner Amtszeit zerschlugen sich die Reste dieser Hoffnung mit der Machtübernahme Donald Trumps, den Ta-Nehisi Coates als "Amerikas ersten weißen Präsidenten" bezeichnet: ein Mann, dessen politische Existenz in der Abgrenzung zu Obama besteht.
  
  Coates zeichnet ein bestechend kluges und leidenschaftliches Porträt der Obama-Ära und ihres Vermächtnisses - ein essenzielles Werk zum Verständnis der Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft der USA, von einem Autor, dessen eigene Geschichte jener acht Jahre von einem Arbeitsamt in Harlem bis ins Oval Office führte, wo er den Präsidenten interviewte.

• 

  Ta-Nehisi Coates: We Accept Violence Against African-Americans as Normal

  Ta-Nehisi Coates In his new book, Between the World and Me, Atlantic magazine columnist Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about the looming violence that African-Americans endure every day, in the form of a letter to his 14-year-old son. Hari Sreenivasan speaks with Coates about the legacy of racism and white supremacy in America.